Military's Leadership Crisis Begins With Bush and Rumsfeld

Bob Geiger expands on Fixer's post, a little below this one, about the crisis in military leadership.

But unlike Abu Ghraib, where low-level enlisted personnel were allowed to take the fall, it is vital that we understand that what happened in Haditha, while certainly an atrocity for which the troops involved bear responsibility, was an overarching failure of leadership that goes all the way to the Oval Office.

Which suggests a significant lack of leadership on the part of officers on the ground and, as I think many Americans now believe, at the Defense Department going all the way to the top of the food chain with Donald Rumsfeld. Somehow these Marines thought it had suddenly become a free-for-all, where all bets were off and all rules of conduct were suspended. Ultimately, accountability for that can only be assigned to people in positions of leadership.

Then there's the White House, the Republican-controlled Congress and the Defense Department who started this war, went into it without a plan to win the peace and are responsible for creating a new generation of troops who have endured multiple deployments and undoubtedly operate with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) now and will for a long time to come.

he Republican Congress talks a lot about supporting the troops but has done little to provide the massive funding necessary for the untold number of PTSD cases we will have in our country for a generation. The second part of that GOP one-two punch, is that they've done zero to bring the White House back to reality and to get our troops the hell out of there so we can avoid having young men and women, stretched to the limit on their third and fourth tours in combat. Indeed, they just voted in principle last week to keep our troops there indefinitely.

There is indeed a problem in our military -- but it goes from the top down, not the other way around. It comes from an administration that likes to use men and women in uniform for Bush's public-relations stunt du jour, who started this war on a whim, who offer nothing but "stay the course" to our 130,000 boots on the ground and who appear to advocate keeping our honorable, but worn-out troops in Iraq forever.

The truth is, if George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld wanted to show a fraction of the honor they expect from our troops, they would all do the right thing -- and resign.

Once they resign (fat chance!) they'll be easier to arrest. That would be a good thing.

Bob also goes into the looming and present nightmare of PTSD that will be with our troops for the rest of their lives. Go read.